Science Fiction and Fan Culture

Or, Do Professors Dream of Electric Sheep (and Hitchhikers

and Players of Games)?

A Brief History of Fan Culture

• Traditions of rewriting or ‘writing back’ to literature/mythology/history, etc.

• SF fandom began with the letter columns in Amazing Stories• The Science Fiction League, started by Hugo Gernsback in

1934, was the first SF fan club• First SF conventions in the 1930s• Term “fanfiction” first used c. 1965• SF mailing lists began in the 1970s, in the infancy of the Internet• Films about fandom in the 1990s-2000s: e.g. Trekkies and

Trekkies II; Free Enterprise; Fanboys; Gibson’s No Maps For These Territories

Some subcultures within SF fandom, based on their following of particular works:

• Trekkies/Trekkers (Star Trek)• Whovians (Doctor Who)• X-Philes (The X-Files)• Browncoats (Firefly/Serenity)…and many others before and since• Contributions to the popular image of SF fans• Contributions to the academic study of SF

Some Characteristics of SF Fan Culture

• Fanfiction: writing new stories about existing characters/works/settings, etc.

• Fan comics (doujinshi in Japanese) and fan art• Fan edits: remixed and/or redubbed versions of films

(most notably the second Star Wars series; also fan-made anime/manga translations, etc.)

• Fanzines: self-published, small-press, or online newsletters - e.g. The Banksoniain (about Banks), Mostly Harmless (Adams’ fan-club newsletter)

• Listservs, messageboards, newsgroups, etc.• Conventions - combine academic, or semi-academic,

conferences with more carnivalesque elements

Fan Culture as Reader Response

• “Interpretive community” (Stanley Fish): meaning is determined/influenced by the community of readers who share similar approaches to the text

• John Fiske: “A text cannot be distanced from its uses and users”

• Responses of authors/artists/producers to readers/viewers/listeners

• “Popular”/“mass” culture scale: what is provided for the people (mass culture) vs. what is used by the people (popular culture)

• Douglas Lanier: “What makes popular culture popular is how it is used, not necessarily the size of its audience, its mass reproduction, or its commerciality”

• Even if the people don’t directly create what is “popular”, they help to decide what is “popular”

• Reinterpretation of works to suit the audiences’ purposes• “Canon formation”: what is considered ‘official’? Can fan-

produced works be considered ‘official’? Can works by the original author be considered ‘unofficial’?

• “Textual fundamentalism” (Brenda Weber): adherence to only one version of the text (e.g. print at the expense of films; first in a series at the expense of sequels, etc.)

• “Fanboy/fangirl” (otaku in Japanese): stereotypical image of the SF fan

• Attention to details; often hyper-critical• William Gibson’s description: “the passionate

obsessive, the information age's embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects” (he popularized the term “otaku” in Idoru)

SF and Fanfiction

• The earliest organizations of fanfiction (including many commonly used terms) arose in the Star Trek fan community

• e.g. “slashing” (single-gender pairings of characters); “Mary Sue” (idealized authorial self-insertion; “author avatar” is the non-derogatory term)

• Derivative works by authors other than the original: can they be called fanfiction too? (e.g. K.W. Jeter’s sequels to Do Androids Dream?; Eoin Colfer’s And Another Thing)

• Douglas Lanier on fanfiction: “Writers of fanfiction take the characters, settings, plotlines, and motifs from established genres and imagine otherwise forbidden relationships between characters, encounters between different characters or fictional worlds...or plot possibilities never explored in the originals”

Some Purposes of Fanfiction

• Modern continuation of oral tradition/adaptation; stories get told and retold, and can change in those retellings

• Retellings to suit the purposes of the new teller and his/her audience

• Fans provide for themselves what the original author can’t, or won’t, provide for them

• Bricolage: taking pieces of established entities and making them your ‘own’

• Fanfiction as written and/or drawn forms of readers’ dreams?

Why Fan Culture?

• Community-building venture, from Gernsback’s letter columns to present-day Internet groups

• Fandom as new religion, with its own rituals and even belief systems?

• Allows fans to feel a connection with the work and/or its creators

• “Fandom Is A Way Of Life”

• Alexander von Thorn: “Science fiction fandom is the community of the literature of ideas...the culture in which new ideas emerge and grow before being released into society at large.”

Other Influences of SF Fan Culture

• Early users and popularizers of new technology, especially computers and the Internet

• Influenced the development of other appreciation societies and even support or activist groups

• The Hugo Awards are presented at the World Science Fiction Convention, one of the largest in North America

• Portrayal of fans and fan culture in SF itself• Fans becoming professional writers in their own right, and

inspiring their own fan communities• Subject of academic studies: e.g. Henry Jenkins, Textual

Poachers; Sam Moskowitz, The Immortal Storm• Academia as fan culture; fan culture as academia - how similar

are they?

Intergenerational FandomFrom an essay by Robert Runte

and a presentation by Robert Runte and Douglas Barbour

• Many members of the first wave of fandom (c. 1925-1965) regarded the new influx in the 1960s and 1970s as unwelcome intrusions; others embraced the mainstream acceptance of SF/fantasy

• Each generation of fandom has different approaches to similar material

• The growth of the SF ‘canon’ brought diversity to the fandom, but also reduced the ‘shared literature’ aspects

• The paradoxes of fandom: as SF and its fandom grow, the world of fan culture becomes splintered; simultaneous acceptance and suspicion of new technology, new practices, etc.

• Ambivalence over trends in SF publication: more and/or better?

Science Fiction in Other Media:

A Brief History and Overview

Early Developments

• c. 1895-1903: experimentation with special effects, often of a fantastic nature

• A Trip to the Moon (1903) by Georges Méliès - the first recognizable SF film, and first adaptation of SF literature into film

• Based in part on Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and H.G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon

• Metropolis (1926) by Fritz Lang - early ancestor of cyberpunk (influenced Dick and Scott)

• Exemplified the social-commentary nature of early European SF films

• Just Imagine (1930): first American SF film to be distributed by a major studio

• A musical, set in a future dystopia

• SF serial films of the 1930s: Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers

• Influenced much of the popular image of SF on film

• Early examples of adaptations of comic strips and radio plays to film and vice versa

SF in Comic Books

• Especially popular in the “golden age” of comics (1930s-1950s) but has continued to the present day

• Comics and visual art lack the technical limitations of film, allowing for greater freedom of visual representation

• Superhero comics can be considered borderline SF too, esp. in explanations of the heroes’ powers

• Digital art in comics, beginning in the 1990s

The “Golden Age” of SF Film

• Destination Moon (1950) by George Pal: first SF film made in colour

• SF of the 1950s was characterized by advances in special effects, but still often of relatively low quality

• Influenced by the advances in military science and space exploration

• Ranged from optimistic to apocalyptic - themes that still continue

SF on Television: The Early Years

• First SF TV series was Captain Video (1949)

• Many early series were adventure programs meant for younger audiences

• Anthology series of the early 1960s, e.g. The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, etc.

• Star Trek began in 1966

Some Related Subgenres

• SF/horror: dates back to Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, etc.; themes include mad scientists, experiments gone awry, alien invasions, etc.

• SF/disaster films: can be technological, biological, environmental, or extraterrestrial

• SF/mystery/suspense: crimefighting technology, forensics; investigations of the alien or paranormal - cf. Sawyer, Gibson, Murakami

• SF/comedy: humorous treatments of SF themes - cf. Adams, Stephenson

• Superhero narratives• SF/romance/adventure: “space opera”; most common subgenre

of SF film

SF Films of the 1960s and 1970s

• Most influential was 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

• Films of this time were more sophisticated in plot and design

• Star Wars: A New Hope and Close Encounters of the Third Kind both released in 1977

• Beginning of the “blockbuster” era: big, flashy adventures emphasizing visual imagery

• Two main directions of films of the 1980s and afterward: idealistic and optimistic vs. dark and dystopian

• CGI imagery first used in early 1980s: e.g. Tron, The Last Starfighter

More Developments in SF on Television

• Various Star Trek spinoffs began in 1987• Prevalence of animation, for audiences of all

ages; use of CGI in live-action series• Connections between TV and film, with series

being adapted from one to another• The Sci-Fi Channel (US) began in 1992; its

Canadian equivalent, the Space channel, began in 1997

SF and Games

• Tabletop RPGs: e.g. Space Opera, GURPS, etc.• Computer games: beginning with early examples e.g.

Space Invaders, Asteroids; present-day “interactive fiction”; influenced by developments in SF on film

• Adaptations between films and games, or between literature and games (Dick, Adams, and Gibson all had games based on their writings, as did Stephenson)

• Influence of gamer culture on SF: e.g. Gibson, Banks, Stephenson

SF on Radio

• Mainly anthology series or specials, most famously Orson Welles’ 1938 adaptation of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (a Halloween special)

• Adams’ radio plays are probably the best-known contemporary example

• Lem and Gibson have also had radio plays based on their works

SF Literature and Other Media

• Have been closely related from the beginning

• Verne and Wells are probably the most frequently adapted SF authors

• Literature adapted from other media: novelizations, spinoffs, sequels, etc.

The CompLit 342 Reading List and Other Media

• Of the writers on our reading list, Dick has been the most frequently adapted; Adams has had the most adaptations of a single work

• Dick, Adams, and Gibson have the most diverse adaptations (film/TV, radio/ audiobooks, computer games, graphic novels)

• Indirect adaptations: Stephenson, Murakami• Non-SF adaptations: Murakami, Banks